library cache growth

Hi,

 I am seeing a very wierd behavior in my Oracle 7.3.4.4 database. My shared pool size is currently set to 400MG. After bootup the performance is generally good until a heavy period during the day after which the library cache latch misses and sleeps go through the roof. There is no noticeable shared pool latch misses and sleeps. What I observe from v$sgastat view is that the size of the 'library cache' parameter continually increases. Although the subcomponents of the Library Cache like 'sql area' don't show the corresponding growth. It keeps on growing until the size is 320MB. Through out this period, I see the sql area invalidations of about 800-900 every hour (v$librarycache view) and the reloads in the same magnitude.

Oracle Support has been completely useless in resolving this issue. Their answer is upgrade but we can't upgrade without upgrading the Oracle Application Server to 4.0.8.2 and my management doesn't want to take the risk to do that.

Any insights in this particular problem? I have tried pinning all the packages, increased session_cached_cursors (which seemed to help quite a bit) but I still have this period where the performance is bad.

Thanks in advance.

Prakash

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